Open Bottom 01/12/16

Submitted by hecate on Tue, 01/12/2016 - 5:04am

I have obtained a copy of the speech the Kenyan intends to deliver tonight. Probably not in this universe, will he deliver it. But, you never know.

god's my life
stolen hence
and left me asleep

i have had a most rare vision

i have had a dream
past the wit of man to say what dream it was

man is but an ass
if he go about to expound this dream

methought i was—
there is no man can tell what
methought i was

and me thought i had—
but man is but a patched fool
if he will offer to say what me thought i had

the eye of man hath not heard
the ear of man hath not seen
man's hand is not able to taste
his tongue to conceive
nor his heart to report
what my dream was

i will get peter quince to write a ballad of this dream
it shall be called bottom's dream

because it hath no bottom

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open bottom

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Comments

Submitted by cybrestrike on Tue, 01/12/2016 - 9:19am

Morning Musings

Bernie Sanders won the MoveOn.org endorsement. Kind of surprised. I've been a member since 2007, so maybe I shouldn't have been. But this is big news...very happy with the result!

I was depressed all day yesterday when I found out David Bowie passed away. I hate days like that...eventually I just avoided all social media for a bit.

The weather dipped below 50 degrees in Florida and will be that way for the next few days--so of course the natives are freaking out.

I think today is going to be a NetFlix day. Like, all day. Might watch Making a Murderer. All of my mates are going crazy about it. Or I might be a curmudgeon and just not pay attention to it. Besides, Buffy the Vampire Slayer might be better watching anyway.

Tonight's SOTU? Probably not going to watch it. Lameduck SOTU's are always boring.

Submitted by hecate on Tue, 01/12/2016 - 10:32am

good for you

for the Netflix.

Lots of bad boring work here, which is why the wee amount of wordage, above.

Submitted by dkmich on Tue, 01/12/2016 - 12:29pm

Wee words are good...

Some of the most profound thoughts can be shared in wee words.

"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon

—

"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon

Submitted by hecate on Tue, 01/12/2016 - 3:29pm

this

is true. One of my favorite poems goes like this:

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Submitted by smiley7 on Tue, 01/12/2016 - 3:37pm

Fog

The fog comes
on little cat feet

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

~ Carl Sandburg

Submitted by hecate on Wed, 01/13/2016 - 10:35am

then there is

found poetry.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igQlbesF0zA]

Submitted by LapsedLawyer on Wed, 01/13/2016 - 7:36am

I watched The Expanse is on Syfy, and The Shanarra

Chronicles on MTV. Space opera and sword&sorcery. Sounded like either good counterpoints or good accompaniment to the fantasies and fictions being woven from the Speaker's rostrum.

—

"Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it."
-- John Lennon

Submitted by gjohnsit on Tue, 01/12/2016 - 10:40am

How Wall Street works

sell buy.jpg

Submitted by enhydra lutris on Tue, 01/12/2016 - 11:51am

YES! But, would we be better off if the myth that

the market was rational were well and truly destroyed? If nobody bought into it, what woulkd be the denouement?

—

That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

Submitted by LapsedLawyer on Wed, 01/13/2016 - 3:33am

And that would be a bad thing because....

—

Submitted by gjohnsit on Tue, 01/12/2016 - 11:06am

What is your threat score?

It just went up

While officers raced to a recent 911 call about a man threatening his ex-girlfriend, a police operator in headquarters consulted software that scored the suspect’s potential for violence the way a bank might run a credit report.
.
As a national debate has played out over mass surveillance by the National Security Agency, a new generation of technology such as the Beware software being used in Fresno has given local law enforcement officers unprecedented power to peer into the lives of citizens.
But the powerful systems also have become flash points for civil libertarians and activists, who say they represent a troubling intrusion on privacy, have been deployed with little public oversight and have potential for abuse or error. Some say laws are needed to protect the public.

Submitted by gjohnsit on Tue, 01/12/2016 - 12:07pm

Rubio: we need more surveillance

yeehaw

Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio wants to add American surveillance programs, many of which were created after 9/11 and curtailed in 2015's USA Freedom Act.
Rubio, speaking Sunday on ABC, redoubled his attacks against Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who supported the Freedom Act.

"We are now at a moment in this country where we don't just need to keep the authorities we already have, we need to add to these programs," Rubio argued.

Submitted by gulfgal98 on Tue, 01/12/2016 - 4:06pm

Yeah, as a Floridian

I would say we need a lot more surveillance into Rubio's past, including his finances and his use of credit cards while in the Florida Senate.

—

Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy

Submitted by shaharazade on Tue, 01/12/2016 - 2:01pm

The old

'some say' news speak. Haven't heard those two hair igniting words since I quit watching TV or reading the papers of mass deception. Speaking of which kos had another presidential poll up. He has decided that the reason Bernie keeps winning his polls is because they are Freeped! I'm one of the some who say hell yes laws are needed to stop this shit.

Submitted by JayRaye on Tue, 01/12/2016 - 2:34pm

pity the poor kos

he starts a web site for more and better democrats and the majority of users on his site, taking him at his word, actually support the better democrat. Imagine that!

Guess that just goes to prove the old saying, "Be careful what you ask for cause you just might get it."

—

Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth.-Lucy Parsons

Submitted by gjohnsit on Tue, 01/12/2016 - 11:23am

Hundreds of thousands can't marry in Israel

link

According to Hiddush, a religious pluralism lobbying group, some 660,000 citizens who are either from the former Soviet Union, gay, non-Orthodox converts to Judaism or have specific types of Jewish personal status, are currently unable to marry in Israel.
This figure was presented to the People, Religion and State Knesset lobby on Monday, which discussed the current options available for marriage and the prevailing situation in which tens of thousands of people are unable to get married in the country where they live and have citizenship.

Hiddush r conducted research based on statistics from the Central Bureau of Statistics. The organization found that there are 364,000 immigrants from the former Soviet Union who are classified as “without religion” and therefore cannot get married in Israel.

Submitted by gjohnsit on Tue, 01/12/2016 - 11:40am

Of banning books in Israel

not working well

An Israeli author whose book was rejected from the national high school curriculum because it depicts a Jewish-Arab love affair is achieving star status at home and abroad.
Sales of "Borderlife" by Dorit Rabinyan have skyrocketed, international inquiries have doubled, and American filmmakers are jockeying for the movie rights.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Rabinyan described the uproar as embarrassing and said it has created "major chaos" for a writer who cherishes her private life. But she said the outpouring of support, at a time when critics are accusing the hard-line government of trying to stifle dissent, is "an expression of support for Israeli democracy."

Rabinyan, 43, wrote "Borderlife" in 2014 and won Israel's prestigious Bernstein literary prize last year. The novel rose to prominence in late December when Israel's Education Ministry rejected a request from teachers to add it to the national high school curriculum. At the time, the country's education minister said he did not want to promote the values in the book.

Submitted by enhydra lutris on Tue, 01/12/2016 - 12:06pm

Israel is a theocracy, which is in accord with the wishes of

the founders and early settlers. Those who have moved there without coercion knew what they were getting into and chose it anyway. It is like somebody proudly joining an exclusive club only to find all of their friends excluded - not really my concern. It is for those unfortunates who were born there, those with no say in the matter, that I can feel sympathy.

—

That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

Submitted by triv33 on Tue, 01/12/2016 - 12:18pm

Hello~

Today in my group I posted this, I'm so tired of the Snowden fanboy stuff...
Big Brother Is Watching You: Is America Becoming Orwell’s Nightmare?

The pervasive surveillance has become the new normal in America. Over 600 state, local, and federal agencies, including the US military and the CIA, conduct intelligence operations through Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF) and Fusion Centers. In 2004, under the Freedom of Information Act, the ACLU discovered an FBI JTTF spying on political advocacy groups, and a follow-up investigation by the Inspector General found that the FBI lied to hide these improper activities from Congress and the American public. A 2012 Senate report found the intelligence gathering at Fusion Centers was flawed, irrelevant, unrelated to terrorism, and posed a serious threat to privacy.
Meanwhile, since 2008 the LAPD has been creating secret Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) based on ordinary, lawful, and constitutionally protected activities such as using cameras in public, shooting videos, using binoculars, drawing diagrams, taking notes, and inquiring about hours of operation. The SARs are stored and shared with thousands of law enforcement and public agencies, and private contractors have access through Fusion Centers. A January 2015 audit by the LAPD Inspector General revealed that while Los Angeles’s black population is less than 10 percent of the total, over 30 percent of SARs involved black residents.
In 2012, the Los Angeles Police Commission approved new guidelines for intelligence gathering on political groups and others engaged in social justice work, which allows the LAPD to insert informants at organizations for 180 days at a time and for LAPD officers to create fictitious personas for online investigations involving Facebook and other social media tools.
This is the very kind of world Winston lived in and so eagerly, and unsuccessfully, tried to escape

Oh, and--art work in progress-

—

I shave my legs with Occam's Razor~

Submitted by Big Al on Tue, 01/12/2016 - 3:30pm

In other words, what Snowden did,

didn't make a bit of difference, they're doing what they want to do anyway?

Many were saying that from the beginning when he and Greenwald decided to disclose little bits at a time instead of blowing the whole thing apart. Greenwald writing a book and saying over the next hill there's going to be revelations that "tear this mutha down".

"They're not going to stop".

Submitted by triv33 on Tue, 01/12/2016 - 4:31pm

No, they are not going to stop.

And I am hard pressed to think of any action we citizens could take to make them even think of stopping.

—

I shave my legs with Occam's Razor~

Submitted by Pluto's Republic on Tue, 01/12/2016 - 8:12pm

Exactly right.

The system cannot be changed from the inside. They is no possible political solution because all political actors are harnessed, by their breeched privacy, to the ship of state.

Thanks for posting that, Triv. I admire that you are keeping the group active.

It will stop. The world is doing it right now. They are in the process of killing the US information and communications technology industry. And our titans of technology are very aware of this. They can see it happening on their spreadsheets. They beg the government to stop, but to no avail.

Sadly, the path to enlightenment often travels through destroyed wealth. Just like 1929.

Anyway, on Friday the Tech Giants met with White House guys. It was a stalemate. What's worse, the global market is reading this and knows US tech industry will now sell products and services thoroughly corrupted by the NSA backdoors:

Apple CEO Tim Cook lashed out at the high-level delegation of Obama administration officials who came calling on tech leaders in San Jose last week, criticizing the White House for a lack of leadership and asking the administration to issue a strong public statement defending the use of unbreakable encryption.

The White House should come out and say “no backdoors,” Cook said. That would mean overruling repeated requests from FBI director James Comey and other administration officials that tech companies build some sort of special access for law enforcement into otherwise unbreakable encryption. Technologists agree that any such measure could be exploited by others.

But Attorney General Loretta Lynch responded to Cook by speaking of the “balance” necessary between privacy and national security – a balance that continues to be debated within the administration.

https://theintercept.com/2016/01/12/apples-tim-cook-lashes-out-at-white-...

Game over.

Submitted by smiley7 on Tue, 01/12/2016 - 3:49pm

I predict that there'll be a bunch of hooey that will make us irritated.

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